A New Class At MIT Gives Students Credit For Browsing Reddit

It seems likely that many students at MIT spend quite a bit of
time on Reddit, but next spring a select few of those students
will actually receive credit for their browsing.

As spotted by Jason Koebler at
Motherboard, the MIT class CMS.400 Media Systems and Texts,
aka "Credit for Reddit," first hit campus about 10 months
ago, and while it will not be offered in the fall, it will resume
come spring.

The class invites students to explore why the site works and
compare it to other social media networks. The
class's co-instructor Chris Peterson thought of starting the
course during his own research on Reddit.

Along with his co-instructor Ed Schiappa, the head
of MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing, Peterson built the
course's curriculum, in part with help from other Reddit users.
In a
Reddit post, Peterson asked users to help him come up with
ideas for the class.

"I've been doing (limited) research on Reddit the last few years
and had lots of undergraduate interest in my projects," Peterson
wrote in the post. "As one student put it, "I already Reddit
instead of homework, so I might as well Reddit for homework."

The post received 121 comments from users eager to contribute to
the class material.

And according to Peterson's LinkedIn page,
the final product wound up introducing "students to central
topics and mixed methods such that they can better investigate
and understand emerging web ecologies." The course went beyond
just Reddit to look at all social media research and
methods.

Or as Peterson told Motherboard, "One of the things we try to do
in this class is make sure people understand that the technology
they use in their daily lives is rooted very deeply in important
social issues."

During Credit for Reddit's first iteration last spring, students
studied more specific ideas like cryptocurrency and
Dogecoin, why Tinder is addictive, and what sorts of headlines
did best on Reddit.

"I had to explain to faculty who didn't use Reddit why it was
important," Peterson told Motherboard. "Well, nobody disputes
that something's important if it's on the front page of the New
York Times.

"If something is on the front page of Reddit, now it matters," he
said. "It tells you something about that community and what they
find important."